When men and women finish school and start working, they’re paid pretty much equally. But a gender pay gap soon appears, and it grows significantly over the next two decades.
So what changes? The answer can be found by looking at when the pay gap widens most sharply. It’s the late 20s to mid-30s, according to two new studies — in other words, when many women have children. Unmarried women without children continue to earn closer to what men do
Read MoreThe Council of Economic Advisers, June 2014
The composition of the workforce has drastically changed over the last half-century. Almost half of the workforce is now women, married couples are increasingly sharing childcare responsibilities, and people are living—and working—longer than in the past. Given the growing number of dual-earner families, today’s workers are trying to balance work, childcare, and eldercare, as well as other responsibilities. In particular, families increasingly need to take time off around the birth or adoption of a child, for their own medical needs, or when a family member becomes ill. This evolving need for caregiving, whether for self or family, requires the ability to take time off from work. Formal sick leave policies allow workers to take a leave, usually for a short period, to recover from an illness, attend a doctor’s appointment, or care for sick family members. Formal family leave policies—both maternity leave and paternity leave—allow recent mothers and fathers to take an extended absence from work while guaranteeing that they can return to their job and continue progressing in their careers.
by Judith Warner, The New York Times
This is an interesting follow up article to"The Opt Out Revolution" (2000) , an article about successful professional women who decided to "opt-out" to exercise one's right to decide (and afford) to become a stay-at-home parent. This article candidly looks at their lives ten years later examines where these women are now and the outcomes of their original decision to leave the workforce.Read More
"The data about the motherhood penalty and the fatherhood bonus present a clear-cut look at American culture’s ambiguous feelings about gender and work. Even in the age of “Lean In,” when women with children run Fortune 500 companies and head the Federal Reserve, traditional notions about fathers as breadwinners and mothers as caregivers remain deeply ingrained. Employers, it seems, have not yet caught up to the fact that women can be both mothers and valuable employees."Read More
"Feminism isn’t a prominent social movement in this country anymore. And one reason for this is blazingly clear: We don’t have an affordable, taxpayer-subsidized system of infant-to-12 child care that levels the playing field for all women, their partners, and their children. What we have is elite women (and men) blathering on about choice, and billionaire executives passing themselves off as role models for working women, while refusing to acknowledge, let alone celebrate the women who help raise their children and manage their homes."Read More
Read MoreThe best hope for improving the lot of all women, and for closing what Wolfers and Stevenson call a “new gender gap”—measured by well-being rather than wages—is to close the leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders. Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone.
The well-being of children, the status of women, and the happiness of men will depend on whether more fathers are willing to take on primary parenting roles.
"Three years ago, my wife, Anne-Marie Slaughter, wrote in these pages about how difficult it remains for women to “have it all”—a family and a career. She’d recently left a high-powered job in Washington, D.C., to return to our home in Princeton, New Jersey, where I had been acting as lead parent to our children. Somewhat ironically, her article on work-life balance led her to increased prominence on the national stage, which reinforced my role as the lead parent of our two sons—a role I continue to fill today."Read More